The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some of such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
In modern communication and computer networks, data exchange between programs and computers is a vital element. Different programs, computers and processors exchange data without human intervention. Different networks and protocols are used in different environments. On the Internet, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is the basic protocol used in communication. TCP/IP takes care of assembling and disassembling the data to be transmitted in packets. IP handles the addressing so that packets are delivered to the correct destination. Above TCP/IP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used as a client/server protocol. A program may send an HTTP request to a server which responds with another HTTP message.
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an Internet service messaging protocol which is widely used in the transmission of automated messages between computer servers on the Internet. SOAP provides an extensible format for providing message exchanges between computers to achieve any given task. At present, the content of a SOAP message is encoded using Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML can be used to represent any kind of information. The messages are made up of structured XML tags. When SOAP messages are transmitted over the Internet, they use an application protocol such as HTTP over TCP/IP or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) over TCP/IP.
Low-power wireless networks, such as IEEE 802.15.4 based embedded and sensor networks, have extremely limited resources for transmitting packets. These networks are very energy efficient, and the chip technology is cheap. For this reason the technology is making its way to embedded devices very quickly for automation, measurement, tracking and control, for example.
The low-power wireless standard IEEE 802.15.4 has been proven as a technology for wireless automation and control. However it has extremely limited resources in terms of frame size (127 Bytes, of which about 90 Bytes available after network protocols), data rates (250 kbps) and network topology along with an unreliable wireless channel. Thus, it is very problematic to use HTTP over TCP/IP for computer—computer communication in these networks. Using XML based SOAP over TCP/IP and HTTP is a very inefficient and heavy solution for low power networks. In fact, in light of the above mentioned limited resources, the use of traditional SOAP is almost impossible as a typical SOAP message takes kilobytes of data and TCP is not well suited to unreliable wireless networks.
Currently application protocols for IP-based low-power wireless networks are designed and implemented in a customary way with each application designer making a byte format of their own, usually useable only within that network. Thus, communication capabilities are very limited.